The English heist movie has a history of being cheeky. From “The Italian Job” (1969) through “Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels” (1999), a cool, brazen wit and stylized violence mark some of the best examples of complicated robbery scenarios in British cinema. Rowan Athale does not ignore that inheritance with his dense debut feature, “Wasteland.”

Yet Mr. Athale, born and raised in Yorkshire, where the film takes place, also guides viewers on a long tour of hopeless youth and realistic violence in the economically ravaged north of England before the playful payoff. To borrow from a term for the gritty, working-class British dramas that this film also nods to, it’s a kitchen-sink caper.

The film begins with an effectively mournful aura as we see the badly beaten up Harvey (Luke Treadaway) under the bright light of police questioning as he explains what led him there in the six weeks since he got out of prison for drug possession. In the flashback scenes that dominate the film, Harvey is reunited with his lifelong best friends, Charlie, Dodd and Dempsey.

The buddies cook up a plan, both for revenge and to start a new life (which is, oddly, the very unglamorous dream of being coffee shop owners in Amsterdam). At times, details of this elaborate crime they’ve concocted are incomprehensible (as are the thick northern accents, even to someone like me who lived for years in London). But a knotty plot is imperative to Mr. Athale’s aims, since, like Robert Bresson’s film “A Man Escaped” or Wes Anderson’s “Bottle Rocket,” this is ultimately a story about friendship, about people who would rather follow a delusional pal than logic.